LDP Christmas Party

Place: Drummoyne Sports Club, Sydney
Date: Thursday 20 December
Time: 7.30pm

Invitation by Peter Whelan (NSW President) to LDP followers and friends…

Election post-mortem

The election is over and we’ve had a week to recover. On the positive side, we ran in our first federal election with the 8th biggest ticket. We picked up lots of good new activists and supporters, introduced some people to libertarian ideas, and 20,000 people voted for us.

But this is just the start and we still have lots to learn and a long way to go. It’s now time to have a careful look at what went right, what went wrong and how things can be improved. For the next month we will be conducting a post-mortem analysis of the election and our campaign.

The review will occur at the LDP Activist blog. This is a private blog, so you will need to be added before you can participate. If you are interested in contributing towards our analysis and help improve the party, then please contact either myself (john.humphreys99@gmail.com) or David Leyonhjelm (treasurer@ldp.org.au).

Democrats RIP

As many people predicted, this election has marked the end of the Democrats as a serious force in Australian politics. They scored 1.27% of the Senate vote and 0.69% in the HoR and did not win any seats. Andrew Bartlett continues to provide his analysis of the election results

The Democrats still have one parliamentarian in South Australia. This puts them in the same league as the Christian Democrats (2 in NSW), Shooters Party (2 in NSW), One Nation (1 in Qld) and Democratic Labor (1 in Vic). If they continue to exist, they can expect to do roughly as well as these parties in the future.

There has been lots of discussion about why the Democrats have faded. Cheryl Kernot. The GST. Natasha Stott-Despoja. I think it’s because they became too similar to the Greens which made them pointless. If people like Greens policies, they would vote Green. If they don’t like Green policies, then they won’t vote for the Greens-lite (ie Democrats).

The demise of the Democrats does give an opportunity to the LDP. Some of the Democrat voters will switch to the Greens… but those looking for an economically and socially liberal alternative could be sympathetic to our message. If we can pitch ourselves as a more “liberal” version of the Democrats then there is about 1% of the vote waiting for us.

Double dissolution?

The background whispers about a potential double dissolution (DD) election within 18 months are now becoming more believable.

Normal half-Senate elections are held every 3 years. Each State has 12 Senators, but only 6 are elected at a normal election, and they hold their seat for two terms (about 6 years). With 6 people being elected, the necessary quota is 14.3%.

But in a DD election all Senators are up for election. With 12 people being elected, the necessary quota drops to 7.7%. This makes it much easier for minor parties to get representation. The Greens would pick up at least 7 Senators, the Democrats would have a chance to be re-born and Family First could pick up a few extra Senators. And the LDP would have a better chance.

A DD election is called when a piece of legislation is rejected by the Senate three times. At the moment it looks like Labor + Greens will have 37 Senators, which is 2 short of the necessary 39 votes. To pass legislation they will need the support of the Liberals, Nationals or both of the conservatives, Nick Xenophon (SA independent) and Steve Fielding (Family First). There is faily easy to think of some legislation that will be rejected.

But will Labor trigger the DD election? Maybe. If Rudd manages to stay popular over the next 18 months, then he may want a DD election to make the Senate easier to deal with.

LDP in the House

As I reported earlier, the LDP received 0.13% of the total vote in the House of Reps (HoR). However, as we only ran candidates in about 1/3rd of HoR seats (47 to be precise) then our total vote does not represent our average vote.

Our average vote in the House was 0.4%. This ranges from 0.08% (La Trobe, Vic) up to 1.42% (Richmond, NSW), with most results between 0.2% and 0.6%.

Our best States were WA (0.51%), Tas (0.47%), NSW (0.46%) and NT (0.62% in Solomon). Our worst State was SA (0.26%), and the final State numbers were Qld (0.33%) and Vic (0.4%). The full results can be seen here.

The NSW Senate

The only chance (and it was always only a small chance) for electoral success at this election was Terje Petersen for the NSW Senate. It hasn’t happened.

We needed a lot of luck to steal the 6th senate spot, and three of those things didn’t come our way.

* The knock-out blow was that the Liberals polled too well. Even if everything else went our way, the Liberal 38.9% gives them 10.3% over 2 quotas and mades it impossible for any micro party, as there simply aren’t enough micro-party votes out there. This also means that the CDP have no chance.

The future of the Liberals

After yesterdays (much deserved) defeat the Liberals are facing some very important decisions.

The most immediate is who will be leader. Costello was the obvious choice, but he has now declined the position. I think this is a smart strategic move on his part. He will let the next leader tackle the tough time ahead and after they lose the next election he will grudgingly accept the leadership (ala Beazley after Latham) and hope to be elected in 2012.

LDP vote as expected

The final LDP vote (national HoR = 0.13%, Senate 0.15%) was roughly as I expected and I don’t think anybody should be overly dissapointed by the outcome. I want to quickly address a few issues.

There are lots of problems that micro-parties have and one of them is expectation inflation. The reality is that the main media always ignores mirco-parties… Australians have never understood the voting system… a majority of people are rusted on Liberal or Labor voters… and most micro-parties end up with 0.1% of the vote or less. It is important to have this context when forming expectations.

Election night news

Below is a running update that I wrote between 7pm and 2am on election night. The short story is that Terje did not win a NSW Senate spot, and our best House result was Dan Farmilo, who got 1.41% in Richmond (NSW).

We got 0.13% of all House votes (10th highest) and 0.15% of all Senate votes (15th highest). Congratulations to everybody who helped out on the campaign and I look forward to building on this base.

Coming to Sydney

In a few hours I will catch a flight down to Sydney to do an interview with Sky Business News. Wish me luck.

I will then be staying in Sydney for election day to help the NSW campaign and hopefully catching up with some of the hard-working Sydney LDP team.

If you have any time to spare on election day, please consider printing out a how-to-vote card and making some copies, and then handing them out at your local polling booth (or the closest one with an LDP candidate).